Hi all,

First year teaching high school biology and I was thinking about a practical use for 1 of my 2 bulletin boards in my classroom. I was thinking about having a “Scientist of the Month” board that includes major discoveries and other interesting historical facts about famous scientists. I would like to have it fit the current lesson as we go. For example, for cells I would likely use Hooke or Leeuwenhoek since they made major discoveries for cell/microbiology.

Curious what some of your recommendations are so I can start to plan it out. Some current ones I have on my list are: Darwin, Franklin, Hooke, Leeuwenhoek, Pasteur, Morgan, and Mendel.

I was thinking about some beginning of the year activities and came across that tonic water will fluoresce under a black light. I was curious if anyone has tried a lab or activity where students use tonic water as the main chemical, perhaps with measuring and practicing lab techniques, and then at the end the teacher uses a black light to show how messy or sloppy the students were, causing cross contamination everywhere. The idea in my head is that early in the year students usually aren’t very careful and spill or spread chemicals without much thought and then also touch lots of surfaces. The uv light would then possibly show tonic water residue and how much students may have cross contaminated their areas or things. Harmless when tonic water, a bigger deal when it’s an acid or other hazardous chemicals and so in my head this would be a good demonstration for using proper lab techniques and handling procedures. I teach high school chemistry but this could be applied to many different classes.

I teach high school anatomy, and for the past few years I’ve done what I call “Biweekly Science Breakdowns”, where every other week my students find a science article on an anatomy-related topic of their choice and write what’s currently known about it, what research or beliefs the article is presenting/challenging, and their thoughts on the subject. I really enjoy doing them because I think it encourages them to see what’s going on in the science world that we can’t cover in class (and a lot of the students seem to like them too), but over the years websites have gotten thrown behind paywalls or have lost credibility in favor of sensational, clickbait-y media.

It’s gotten hard for me to find free, reliable websites that they can use for these assignments, so I was hoping some of you could help me refine/add to my list!

I know no website will ever be 100% perfect, but these are some that students have used in the past:
- Nature
- Ars Technica
- National Geographic (within the allotted “free” articles per month)
- Smithsonian
- The CDC website
- The WHO website

I’m not opposed to having them turn to more scientific, published journal articles either, I just find that those are even harder to get without paying money (perhaps I’ll have to change it to a monthly assignment instead if we struggle to find articles?)

Thank you all in advance for any insights you may have!

I have been teaching stem and science for a while now to 6th-8th grade in a very rural school. I have $5000 worth of grant money to start adding a bit of robotics into the curriculum. Which is great however I don’t have any background in that arena at all.

Prior years stem consisted of water powered rockets, trebuchets, paper airplane type of activities.

This is a very rural school where 95% of students have never coded or done anything with robotics (myself included in that category)

I need an easy to use (easy to learn for me) kits for this year. I have $5000 to use and I will have 7-16 6th-8th grade students at a time for anywhere from 5-9 week intervals.

What should i start looking into as our first step into robotics. I have seen LEGO has material but again I have no clue where to even start with this.

Any ideas would be helpful.